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Hellobank!
Co-Creation Event

Jean-Paul Sartre is famous for his many smart quotes, one of them being “finding the right answer is always easier than finding the right question”.

That was exactly why we started our Hellobank! Co-Creation event with an online contest to collect a rich myriad of questions around the current state of banking. Within three weeks, we had 1,400

smart questions. A great starting point for phase 2 of the event, the Ideation workshop in Berlin. But let’s start from the beginning.

user

get together interested prospective customers

centred

work and collaborate with them intensely

service

to develop services

innovation

that no bank is offering so far

The leading idea

It was spring 2012 when CortalConsors reached out to us with a rather unusual inquiry “Could you support us with the Launch campaign for Hellobank! in Germany?”. USEEDS° is a well-known pioneer for user-centred design, but

campaigns are not really something we do on a daily basis. So our answer was “Yes, sure, but it will be a user-centred event”. They agreed and we started designing the biggest online and offline co-creation event ever.

Listen and Understand:
the Question phase

In the first phase, we wanted to get inspired by people. Let them be demanding, let them question the core business of our client, let them define the topics of Phase 2, the actual Ideation workshop. With our campaign website hellobank.de users could enter their questions and gain points to win one of the few “tickets to Berlin” to the Ideation event. “Why do I have to go to the ATM, why doesn’t it come to me?” Questions like that one already made us think about future

services. In the end of phase 1, we had a huge pile of about 1,400 questions. We needed to dig through all of them, to find our topics for the workshop. We stood in front of these walls of questions not knowing exactly what to expect. It was like opening an old book in an antiques shop. We did not know what stories would emerge and how they are connected or what topics were most interesting to the community of participants.

As a result we had chosen three leading questions for the three days of Online and Offline Ideation in phase 2. The leading questions:

How to manage my money easily and quickly?

How can banking become more personal?

How can banking be more inspiring?

Phase 2:
The Ideation event

Our aim was bold: we wanted to include the whole Online Community we created in phase 1 in the Ideation workshop. The set-up we designed allowed the Community to continuously watch what was happening through cameras and a live ticker.

So far so good for the entertainment part. But we also wanted them to participate, so we had one person joining the creative teams whom we called the “Avatar”. The Avatar spoke for the community (connected via a live blog) and wore

a head-held camera to allow all online participants to be part of the discussions and brainstorming sessions. The comments and ideas of the community were also shown on a huge “User Cube” standing in the middle of the room.

After only 3 days, we had a set of 18 service innovations to define the future of banking. Co-created by some thousand people all over Germany. A great opening for the new German brand “Hellobank!

Engaging the user:
the set up

Fabian Klenk

We all know online co-creation initiatives like Tschibo, ideo, Starbucks etc. But when I tried to get involved in this initiative as a customer, I always missed something.

It is the magic that happens when you do an ideation process with other people in one room - the moment when you realize that someone made a very good point and you could build on that to make the solution even better. And then you start working as a team to figure out all aspects of the idea. You get really excited and at

the end, you believe you were part of something special. That never happened to me in an online workshop. So we wanted the experience of a workshop taking place at a one physical location, with the possibility to participate from wherever you are - online.

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